Package and instructions arrived earlier than expected, with easy set-up through the Ring app using the provided QR code. Installation took about 15 minutes, including ladder set-up, mounting time, and app programming. The screws provided are small enough to not pierce through the home, but threaded properly to grip the vinyl appropriately for mounting. Neither the solar panel nor the lights are very heavy, but secure enough that they hold up nicely with decent wind.
The addition of the solar panel alone is worth the cost of not having to drill more for hard-wiring, or climbing up and down a ladder to replace/recharge batteries. Conversely, if a light detects motion, then it can prompt a Ring camera to start recording.
Ring Solar Floodlight review: What a difference the sun makes
Yes, the solar floodlight costs nearly twice as much ($90 vs $50), but when you factor in the cost of batteries over the presumed life of the device—and aren’t included in your initital purchase of the D-cell-powered model—it’s basically a wash. Plus, you won’t need to get on a ladder to change them when they die, or feel guilty about tossing them in the trash when they’re spent. It’s a small thing since most floodlights will likely be attached to a beam or the side of a house, but it brings some peace of mind that it won’t come toppling down and land on someone’s head.
Michael Simon/IDG The solar panel will need to be positioned to get a good deal of light each day.
Installation of the Solar Floodlight is pretty easy, though you’ll need some space and a power drill, as with the rest of Ring’s devices.
I had to move my solar panel after a couple of days, since the overhang shadow blocked just enough light. It would be ideal if Ring could find a way to integrate a solar panel large enough to keep the battery powered, as it does with its pathway light.
Ring still offers three main sensitivity settings, but a new slider adds five steps for more granular detection. If you want to build out a Ring Smart Lighting system, the Solar Floodlight is a great place to start. It’s brighter and lighter than the original and links up nicely to your other Ring devices with no power-driven restrictions.
Ring Floodlight Cam review: An excellent choice—if you’re living in Ring’s ecosystem
This appeal of this feature wasn’t immediately clear to me, but a Ring spokesperson explained that it will be valuable “for customers that want to be extra careful to avoid recording miscellaneous conversations or audio that does not pertain to their home security.” While Ring emphasizes that subscriptions are optional, you’ll be restricted to real-time viewing of what the camera sees if you don’t opt in to one after your 30-day free trial.
Its Presence camera has onboard storage in the form of a 16GB microSD memory card, and you can download recorded video to your smartphone via the app. The Maximus Camera Floodlight that I reviewed in earlier in 2018, which is based on Kuna’s technology, allows you to look back in time two hours and download up to three videos per month without a subscription.
We previously reviewed the Ring Spotlight Cam, which is designed to be plugged into an outdoor outlet and has a single LED light. Like the aforementioned Netatmo and Kuna products, most people will install the Floodlight Cam as a replacement for an existing outdoor light. That’s a whole lot easier than cutting a hole in your exterior wall, installing a junction box, and running Romex to it. It’s relatively easy to replace an existing outdoor fixture, and Ring makes it even easier with excellent instructions and videos covering every step of the process that you can watch on your phone. These lights are rated to produce a combined 3,000 lumens of brightness, but to my eye, the dual floodlights on the Maximus covered more area. This could be due to the cone-shaped shades on the Ring product that focus the beams more tightly than the flat LED panels on the Maximus, which are rated to produce 2,400 lumens. The Floodlight Cam’s motion sensor detects movement over a 270-degree radius and can be fine-tuned to reduce or increase its sensitivity (you can, for example, set it to respond only to humans and ignore cars or four-legged visitors). The Ring app provides an excellent tool for creating multiple irregularly shaped motion zones, so that you can prevent objects such as shrubs and trees from triggering the lights and camera.
Ring The ability to plot more than one motion zone makes it easy to prevent windblown trees and shrubs from triggering false alerts. The Ring Floodlight Cam records video with excellent quality, with just a little barrel distortion at the extremes of its field of view. Ring attributes this limitation to the 2.4GHz frequency band’s superior range, but the fact that it’s equipped with an 802.11n adapter tells me the choice has more to do with bottom-line cost. As a result, it takes a bit of time to establish a connection to the camera’s live feed, and audio was choppy at best. The Ring Protect Plus plan covers an unlimited number of cameras, so you could put one of Ring’s doorbells at your front door and its Floodlight or Spotlight cams at every other door and anywhere else you have electrical power (or not, since some of its Spotlight cams run on battery power, and with optional solar-power recharging).
Ring Spotlight Cam Solar | HD Wireless Outdoor Security Camera
Record your videos and capture photos to review, save, and share the moments you missed at any time. Customize your alerts and minimize interruptions by getting notifications only when your device spots a person.
Ring Smart Lighting Solar Floodlight Review: A Bright Choice
Ring Smart Lighting Solar Floodlight MSRP $89.99 Score Details DT Editors’ Choice “You won’t be able to find a smarter, more useful solar security light on the market.” Pros Adjustable brightness No need to worry about batteries or wiring, and installation takes an amazingly quick 5 to 10 minutes.
This writer’s backyard gets as dark as a mine shaft at night, so I need a floodlight that can really put out the light. But when I tried out the Ring Smart Lighting Solar Floodlight on a cloudy night, it lit up most of the quarter-acre lot behind my home.
I set the light up to medium sensitivity and then left my dogs in the backyard for a few hours. For example, every time your floodlight detects motion it can be set up to turn on your video doorbell’s camera automatically.
This ensures that if someone tries sneaking around your property, you have a better chance of catching some video footage of the person — plus it’s a wonderful deterrent. As long as you put the 2W solar panel in a sunny spot, you’re pretty much good to go.
The Ring Bridge is $50 and is about the size of half a deck of cards, so it will take up very little room in your home.
The Ring Smart Lighting Solar Floodlight ($90) is affordable, easy to install, and has zero upkeep. There are quite a few solar powered floodlights on the market at a range of prices from $35 to $600, but there are very few that can be controlled with an app, and likely none that can be connected to other lights in your home.
Ring Floodlight Cam review: A perfect deterrent?
(Pocket-lint) – Ring is perhaps best known for its video doorbells that not only let you speak to anyone at your front door when you’re not around, but can even be used to help catch any unwanted visitors to your home. Unlike some other outdoor security cameras – Arlo, for example – the Ring Floodlight Cam only works on mains power and doesn’t have a wire-free battery option. Whichever installation route you choose, for the simplest setup you’ll need to make sure there’s access to a power socket nearby, which will determine to some degree where you place the camera on your property. Note that in the UK, mains electrics require official sign-off by a qualified professional to be safe and legitimate. Click “set up device” and the app will then ask you to select which Ring product you want to add – you may already have existing ones, or intend to buy more – then to confirm your location. It’s flanked by the floodlights which output at 3000 Kelvin, putting the beam into the “warm” lighting category, so is ideal for outdoor use.
It also allows you to shrink the default zone so it doesn’t constantly go off and send you notifications every time a car drives past your house or the regular dog walkers go by in the early mornings. We chose to set our zone just on our driveway, so we were only notified when family members came home or, say, a delivery driver came to the door.
The Ring Floodlight Cam records Full HD 1080p video – both when streaming live and when it detects motion – and saves a clip to the cloud for future reference.
If you’re away from home and you do notice pesky intruders, not only will they be illuminated by the floodlights, but you can make the rest of your neighbourhood aware of their presence by activating the built-in siren.
Whenever the Floodlight Cam detects motion, it will send a notification to your phone so you can immediately tap into the live view and see what’s caused it. The camera will also record a clip of the motion and save it to the cloud for you to access later through your Ring account – either through the app or on a computer.
Then, of course, there’s the Cam’s pièce de résistance: the addition of floodlights, which adds an extra layer of protection to your home. As security deterrents go the Ring Floodlight Cam brings classic features into the modern tech world and it does a great job of spotting and notifying you of any potential threats – including scaring them away with the built-in alarm.
It too requires proper installation but it offers 1080p video day and night, it’s capable of detecting people, cars and animals up to a customisable 20-metres and the floodlight can be switched on manually if you want it to.
It can be either mains or battery powered – the latter great for renters who don’t want to be feeding cables around the place – and offers similar alerts and recordings as the Floodlight Cam.
You’ll have to buy the actual ring sound – called the Chime – separately, though, which feels like an oddity for what’s meant to be a doorbell.
Ring Floodlight Cam Review
As we powered up the camera for the first time, it asked us to update its firmware (which seems to be the norm these days), and within five minutes we were in business. To get a firsthand view of how Linked Devices works, we decided to focus on the neighborhood friendly feline.
That way, if our mysterious neighborhood cat happened to run through our yard at any point overnight, there’d be a good chance our cameras would catch it! At that point, we thought, two things would happen: we could get a good look at how the camera’s infrared night vision works in tandem with those super-bright floodlights; and we could see the elusive kitty’s path for a few seconds after motion was detected.
Pro Tip: We recommend cameras with infrared night vision because they don’t rely on ambient light. It’s worth mentioning that the ability to link devices together is pretty typical in home security cameras these days.
It’s another perk of building your own smart home ecosystem with a brand like Ring; all of their devices tend to communicate with each other pretty effortlessly. Clearly, our Spotlight Camera in the front of our house failed to pick up the cat before she entered our backyard; we surmise she must have walked in from another neighbor’s yard that backs up to ours.
As a standard feature in most security cameras these days, we’ve seen the extraordinary images captured with 1080p HD resolution.
This is most evident from Ring’s floodlight model, where we viewed refreshingly clear and crisp video 24 hours a day, rain or shine. When it comes to audio on the Floodlight Cam, it tends to work pretty well with one exception: we noticed a lot of interference when there was background noise on either side of the conversation. The truth is, ambient noise5 is a challenge for any outdoor camera, as it’s largely unpredictable (we can’t exactly tell the garbage truck to quiet down!).
Even the brands that promise Cadillac-level features in every camera (think Nest Cams) still pick up wind gusts and tree branches, so we consider this a minor issue. Ring is known for giving its users sweeping control over how their cameras detect motion, which alerts you receive, and how much data you get.
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